Saturday, May 02, 2009

The One Member One Vote Vote

WOMOV is in.

The most hotly anticipated vote of the weekend just wrapped up, with the Liberal Party overwhelmingly rejecting the 25% youth quota amendment and deciding to adopt a weighted one member one vote leadership selection process. As I've argued before, both of these decisions were the right ones to make, and I'm glad delegates voted the way they did.

Now, the play-by-play.

The supporters of the youth amendment had the buttons and pamphlets, but with a low youth turn-out at this convention (10-15% of delegates), the demographics weren't in their favour for the vote. Opponents also played the microphone well, putting up Justin Trudeau and two young Liberals to speak against the amendment, whereas there was not a single senior party member who spoke in favour of it. The amendment was soundly rejected, by about 85% of those in the room, I'd estimate.

On the WOMOV vote itself, Belinda Stronach and Bob Rae spoke in favour of it - Bob really fired up the crowd and it was fairly obvious it would pass. Which it did, with a good 80% of the room in favour.

So conventions just got a bit less fun, but the party just got a bit more democratic. All in all, that's not an awful trade-off to make.

Just watched the CPAC broadcast of Iggy's coronation. Very impressive. It is a much more powerful narrative than anything the CPC has done. It's a reflection of the greater political experience and cultural sophistication of the LPC.

Good convention for the Liberals. Good news, in the long run on the OMOV front, your' Party has been ill served by the delegate process, and the implications at the EDA level. So how are you going to entice the Bloc to vote a no-confidence motion?